Donate it to the library or a local food bank. Simple community building.

Several years ago I was taking economic classes at my local university out of interest and to be more informed about intentions in our geopolitical world.

A few years after those classes I ran as a candidate for city council in my local municipal elections on a platform based on sound economic policy. I did not get elected, not even close, as I was running opposite an incumbent.

A few years after that I saw this man at a coffee shop that I knew I recognized from somewhere, but had no chance of remembering him on my own. He came up to me and prompted me, and I then realized that he was one of my economic profs, retired now, from when I was taking courses all those years ago.

After brief pleasantries he said: "I recognized your name in the last election. I wanted to say that I voted for you."

Quite surprised, I managed to respond with a sincere smile on my face: "coming from an economist, that really means a lot to me, thank you".

That does help. Thanks.

I really hope that the people of Thunder Bay recognize how fortunate they are that they have such a dedicated group of local journalists actively engaged in battling decades of systemic racism, backed by an independent journalism institution actually committed to strengthening democracy.

That sort of thing seems like it is a little less common in our western world these days. What is it that they keep saying, democracy dies in darkness?

I have questions about the macroeconomic implications of AI replacing jobs. Does this mean that those workers will shift to other non-AI jobs? Or does this mean that unemployment goes up and there just aren't any jobs for people any more?

The way I am thinking about this, if corporations are able to hoard more wealth and increase profits substantially by getting rid of the need to pay people, how does the economy function if the money that would be paid to those workers is no longer circulating back into the economy?

If people then will get money from a UBI instead of labor income, who pays the government taxes? Corporations? Consumption taxes on people?

If corporations manage to get labor costs to near zero, profits go to near infinity, which is the goal of profit maximizers. But then there is no money in the hands of individuals to be able to pay to consume the goods or services these corporations provide? Is this desire to replace human labor with AI not just a living example of the myth of Icarus?

Any economists out there interested in breaking these issues down into more of a layman language for me? Thanks!

Change the goal. The French economist Thomas Piketty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty) has demonstrated, using 250 years of historical data, that the wealth gap increases as long as the rate of return on capital is greater than the growth rate. Every institution in the western world (including governments who are trying to maximize tax income) are trying to maximize return on capital. Growth is good if it is in the public interest. If we only want growth because it increases our returns on capital, inequality is the result.

Good unpopular opinion!

The goal of capitalism is maximizing capital. What happens in society then is that human well-being comes second after capital maximizing. Yes, it is uncontested that capitalism has improved global human well-being. GDP growth is very obviously correlated with increase in human well-being. But correlation does not imply causation. If the goal were to maximize human well-being first and have capital come second, the outcomes would be different.

One criticism of capitalism that is ignored is that it was the 19th-20th century discovery of super-low entropy energy sources that were incorporated into production that has lead to such rapid growth in technological advances and efficiency. Within neoclassical economic models oil is considered a substitute for capital (which is infinite), not as a limited natural resource that provides energy that allows production to take place.

And so, as capitalism chugs on and on in society, burning more and more oil will continue to generate more and more capital, growth will go up and up and finally after all of that human well-being will go up and up. There is no endgame there, what happens when oil runs out? Or when there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere for human well-being to be sustained on earth?

If the goal changes from capital maximizing to human well-being maximizing then there is an endgame, to ensure sure that human well-being (infinite?) is always sustained on earth. Increasing capital can come after that instead.

This is the third time I have seen this story come up from three different science journalism websites recently.

Here is the actual published proof.

It seems a lot of commenters on these threads have a lot of skepticism about the authors claims, as we should with such a bold claim. Are there any mathematicians or logicians here that can actually unpack the proof with scrutiny and explain it to me in lay terms?

How this can be achieved is the question

Just fucking vote. Engage in all local, state, and federal elections. Be invested in the results. Everyone, all the time, vote on everything. Believe in democracy.

That is just how rotating things work. This is why vehicles need a differential, so that when you turn a corner the inside wheel can rotate at a different speed as the outside wheel.

I am from Thunder Bay and have lived here my whole life. These are not new stories, and the highest 10 year average in Canada in this case is not a surprise. TBay is a bottleneck between eastern and western Canada. It is a hub for dozens of Northern Ontario remote First Nations communities. In all of the small communities outside of TBay, there are billboards on the highway that are directed specifically at reminding people that "Human Trafficking is a Crime". I don't intend to be directly confrontational, but the comment:

maybe there should be some awareness campaign and/or educational programs to get the public more knowledgeable and work to recognize and report these instances or avoid them.

is incredibly ignorant. Located on the north shore of Lake Superior, TBay is visited by dozens of Great Lake and International cargo ships daily during the shipping season; it isn't an issue of the public not recognizing that trafficking is taking place, it is a crime of opportunity. TBay is also regularly considered to be the 'murder capital of Canada'. We have some of the highest drug overdose rates in the country as well. Some people might be oppositional to my point of view here, but the problem is systemic racism.

The only access to most of the remote First Nations in Northwestern Ontario is through TBay. Drug trafficking as well as human trafficking up North can only happen through the city. A lot of these remote communities are also struggling with increasing populations and limited access to resources. Several of these communities are under boil water advisories due to lack of resources and infrastructure, some of which have been so for over 15 years. This issue is incredibly complex, but realistically it comes down to the fact that anti-Indigenous racism is rampant and very well off still within our country, despite Harper's apology and all of the 'Truth and Reconciliation' that has been happening lately.

Some media resources, in case anyone is interested in looking further into the issue: Brief Podcast series on the topic Award winning narrative outlining the overt racism in TBay

Your worth is defined by how much you give away, not how much you accumulate. Stark contrast to our Western societies.

We don't understand gravity to the point where we have a consistent algorithmic explanation for it. As suggested, there are competing theories, all of which are algorithmically based. The holy grail of modern physics is to find the algorithm that explains gravity as that is the last missing piece to finalize the theory of everything.

The results of this research are implying that it is not possible to prove, algorithmically, that gravity is quantum but rather that quantum gravity as the foundation of the universe is non-algorithmic and therefore non-computational. And so a theory of everything is impossible, implying that the universe cannot be simulated by computing the theory of everything.

This research builds on a lot of the work that Roger Penrose did in the 90s in exploring the potential non-algorithmic nature of consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose#Consciousness). If you read his book "Shadows of the Mind" published in 1993 you will find a prediction of future computational abilities that is a shockingly accurate description of AI deep fakes and the AI slop we see today with LLMs.

The no-simulated universe idea is one interesting conclusion of this research, but in my opinion, a more interesting conclusion of this research is that if you believe Penrose's argument for consciousness being non-algorithmic, than this research is implying that AGI is also impossible.

Yes, I do genuinely agree with you that, especially in the context of this post, most nice gestures like this aren't flirtatious at all. I'm simply trying to point out that there are people who work front line jobs and who have bad days that aren't perfectly attuned to social cues and gestures out in public and interpret social situations in diverse ways.

I just think that the risk of coming off as insincere if you say something nice is way lower than the risk of coming off as a creep and making someones bad day feel worse.

Thank you for this. My recent hyper fixation has lead me down the rabbit hole of non-algorithmic theories of consciousness with a specific focus on the theory mentioned in this proof. Would I be interpreting this proof correctly in asserting that if consciousness is non-algorithmic, this proof means AGI is impossible?

Disproving the 'matrix theory' is just the catchy headline to garner clicks. The results of the research are beyond just the matrix. For example, this proof means that non-algorithmic determinism isn't something that represents a lack of deeper theoretical understanding. There are theories that consciousness is non-algorithmic. In that case, this proof means that AGI is also impossible.

I genuinely appreciate your concern. I'm really glad that you are here in Canada, as open minded people make our world a better place.

Engaging with racism is always helpful, in any context. Here in TBay there used to be a city committee directly committed to addressing racism in the city. They had a campaign headlined: "If you witness racism, say something", with a link to report observations. The headline was on billboards, city buses and everything around the city.

I suppose enough local tax payers complained about inefficient use of tax dollars and that committee has since been retired. But the international headlines about TBay continue.

Alfred North Whitehead - Process & Reality (1929)

The most difficult read of my life, but it changes worldviews.

Maybe!

However, their argument rely on that ”quantum gravity” is what makes the universe uncomputable. I’m not sure how valid this statement is.

Here is the assumption the authors use that brings quantum gravity into the proof:

As we do not have a fully consistent theory of quantum gravity, several different axiomatic systems have been proposed to model quantum gravity [26–32]. In all these programs, it is assumed a candidate theory of quantum gravity is encoded as a computational formal system F_QG = {L_QG, ΣQG, R_alg} .

I interpret their assumption to mean that describing quantum gravity in this way is how it would be defined as a formal computational system. This is the approach that all of the other leading theories (String Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity) have taken, which have failed to provide a fully consistent and complete description of gravity. I think the proof is saying that non-computational components can be incorporated into a fully consistent and complete formal system and so taking a non-computational approach to quantum gravity would then incorporate gravity into the formal system thereby completing the theory of everything.

Does that make sense? I am not a logician by any extent and I have no idea how robust this proof really is. I do think the bold claims the authors are making deserve heavy scrutiny, but I am not the one to provide that scrutiny.